The Legend of Jim Comey His political actions spared Clinton and protected his own job.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-legend-of-jim-comey-1467933476
Three days after James Comey’s soliloquy absolving Hillary Clinton of criminal misuse of classified information, the big winner is—James Comey. Washington’s elite are hailing the FBI director as a modern King Solomon for avoiding a political crisis while telling the truth.
Forgive us if we don’t join the beatification. Now that we’ve had more time to digest Mr. Comey’s legal reasoning, and after his appearance on Capitol Hill Thursday, his actions are all the more troubling and set a dangerous precedent. He often poses as the deliverer of “hard truths,” and the hard truth is that he has helped himself politically but not the cause of equal treatment under the law.
Mr. Comey criticized Mrs. Clinton’s “extremely careless” handling of classified materials and found “evidence of potential violations” of the law but then recommended no charges. He conceded that his job is not to decide on criminal prosecutions, but he then contradicted himself by declaring that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Mr. Comey’s public pronouncement that he would not recommend charges is highly unusual, and not a credit to the FBI. The bureau and its director are not the last word in the U.S. justice system. Their time-honored role is to uncover the facts, build a case, and leave the decision on prosecution to Main Justice.
Law-enforcement officials are also not supposed to talk beyond the “four corners” of an indictment, much less about an ongoing investigations except when disclosing information necessary to protect public safety. Their evidence and theories are meant to be adjudicated in adversarial courts, which is in part why Mr. Comey ought to have presented his findings and recommendation privately.
Regular order was even more important given President Obama’s multiple media interviews in which he effectively exonerated Mrs. Clinton, and Bill Clinton’s meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac last week. Mr. Comey justified violating Justice Department norms because of “intense public interest.” But if he really believed that such a politically charged case required a public presentation of the facts, then he should have simply presented the facts and not editorialized about the merits. CONTINUE AT SITE
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